Clusters of galaxies easier to view with radio X-ray combination

By means of the intelligent use of two forms of telescopes, a staff of researchers has produced beautiful pictures of clusters of galaxies. This not solely produces lovely pictures, but in addition gives extra details about the large quantities of power launched round supermassive black holes in clusters. The astronomers, led by Ph.D. scholar Roland Timmerman (Leiden College, the Netherlands), will quickly publish their technique within the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Astronomers have lengthy identified that supermassive black holes on the facilities of galaxies produce enormous jets. These jets shoot away from the black hole and warmth the gasoline within the wider environment. When the jets collide with gasoline, they type enormous lobes tens of 1000’s of light-years in diameter. It could take a whole bunch of tens of millions of years for these lobes to fade out. Thus, in concept, not less than, the lobes give astronomers lots of info relating to what occurred in a cluster.

The issue, nonetheless, is that the data is troublesome to extract from the lobes. A global staff of astronomers has now put an finish to that. They mixed measurements from the radio telescope LOFAR, whose core is within the Netherlands, with these from the X-ray satellite Chandra.

Complete larger than sum

“That mixture gives a significantly better thought of what’s going on,” explains researcher Roland Timmerman (Leiden College, the Netherlands).

“It is cliché, however the entire is actually larger than the sum of the components right here. Chandra and LOFAR can individually make a reasonably affordable guess in regards to the quantity of power injected by the black hole into the cluster setting, however collectively they’re even stronger. Beforehand, this mixture was not attainable as a result of no radio pictures had been out there with adequate high quality to match Chandra’s X-ray pictures. As a result of LOFAR antenna stations at the moment are situated all through Europe, the decision is excessive sufficient.”

The astronomers now have radio pictures which can be comparable in sharpness to visible-light pictures from the Hubble telescope. To reveal their approach, they imaged the Perseus cluster. That may be a group of greater than a thousand galaxies situated about 240 million light-years within the course of the northern constellation Perseus.

In the meantime, astronomers are creating composite pictures of different clusters of galaxies. With the underlying knowledge, they hope to grasp extra in regards to the interactions between galaxies and their environment within the early universe.